(Male body parts, vividly evoked though not pictured. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)
The spectre of the Daily Jocks Mystery Crotch, which materializes every so often, by commercial magic, to offer DJ’s bargain Mystery Underwear:
(#1)
Around this enigmatically seductive figure there has grown up a rich folk tradition of poetry, song, and visual art, the seminal work being the text Magical Mystery Crotch Rocketman, created by the appropriately mysterious queer cooperative Darts of Desire.
MagMystCroRo
Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side,
Where the colored grrlz go:Roll up
He’s got everything you need
Roll up for the Mystery Crotch
Roll up
Satisfaction guaranteed
Roll up for the Mystery Crotch
(#2) Eyes on the stars, thoughts on the crotchAnd Little Joe goes:
I think it’s gonna be a long long time
‘Till a morning brings me round to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m Crotch RocketmanCrotch Rocketman burning out his fuse in here alone
This is the tradition of the Mystery of Fire. Then, necessarily, there’s a contrary tradition of the Mystery of Darkness. In which the central ritual is
The Unmanning
(#3) Desire and DreadI slip into
Mystery Underwear and
all the furniture of my
crotch turns indistinct,
unknowablemy handsome ass and its
musty rose of sex
dissolve in mistmy curly dark pubic hair
messenger of male sweat
crumbles to dustmy weighty balls
contract, shrivel, vanishmy sturdy cock
softens and
melts awayI am unmanned
Notes on the texts and images. #1 is a Daily Jocks image used for their Mystery Underwear sale offers — most recenty, just yesterday.
#2 is today’s DJ image advertising their Mystery Underwear, with the price list replaced by ghostly echoes of the main image. The model appears to be gazing dreamily off into space, or maybe he’s just flouncing seductively. His crotch is notably large — it looks decidedly padded — but it shows no outlines of his cock and balls, crotch features that are usually entertainingly obtrusive in DJ’s underwear ads.
#3 is the image from the TitanMen 2020 Valentine’s Day sale on gay porn, presumably showing male lovers, but I found their facial expressions complex and subject to alternative understandings.
Then the texts. The framing text is somewhat transformed bits — “Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side, / Where the colored grrlz go:” and “And Little Joe goes:” — from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”. On the song, from Wikipedia:
“Walk on the Wild Side” is a song by Lou Reed from his second solo album, Transformer (1972). It was produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, and released as a double A-side with “Perfect Day”. The song received wide radio coverage, despite its touching on taboo topics such as transsexual people, drugs, male prostitution, and oral sex.
… The lyrics, describing a series of individuals and their journeys to New York City, refer to several of the regular “superstars” at Andy Warhol’s New York studio, the Factory, namely Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro [Little Joe], Jackie Curtis and Joe Campbell (referred to in the song by his nickname Sugar Plum Fairy).
You can listen to the original recording here (#4). The relevant bits of the song:
… Candy came from out on the island,
In the backroom she was everybody’s darling,
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She said, hey baby, take a walk on the wild side
Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
And the colored girls go,
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo …… Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City is the place where they said:
Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
I said hey Joe, take a walk on the wild side
Inside the framing bits are two transformed pieces of rock songs and an allusion to a gay pornstar (and his motorcycle).
The first rock song (transformed in MagMystCroRo) is the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”. From Wikipedia:
Magical Mystery Tour is an English surreal comedy television film directed by and starring the Beatles. It is the third film that starred the band and depicts a group of people on a coach tour who experience strange happenings caused by magicians. The premise was inspired by Ken Kesey’s Further adventures with the Merry Pranksters and the then-popular coach trips from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights. Paul McCartney is credited with conceptualising and leading the project.
… The film originally aired on BBC1, in black-and-white, on Boxing Day, 26 December 1967. A colour transmission followed on BBC2 on 5 January 1968. It was poorly received by critics and audiences, although its accompanying soundtrack was a commercial and critical success. The film received an American theatrical release in 1974 by New Line Cinema, and in select theatres worldwide in 2012 by Apple Films.
… The songs in order of their use in the movie, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney unless otherwise indicated:
“Magical Mystery Tour”
“The Fool on the Hill”
“She Loves You” (played on a fairground organ as part of the general medley of background music during the impromptu race)
“Flying” (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr)
“All My Loving” (orchestrated, as background music, in the style of the “Pas de deux” section from The Nutcracker ballet by Tchaikovsky)
“I Am the Walrus”
“Jessie’s Dream” (instrumental piece, not released on any audio recording)
“Blue Jay Way” (George Harrison)
“Death Cab for Cutie” performed by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (Vivian Stanshall / Neil Innes)
“Your Mother Should Know”
“Magical Mystery Tour (Reprise)” (credited as “part of the full Magical Mystery Tour”, but this is not the case)
“Hello, Goodbye” (part, finale played over end credits)
You can listen to the 2009 remastered version of the original here (#5). Some relevant bits of the original:
Roll up roll up for the Mystery Tour
Roll up roll up for the Mystery Tour… The Magical Mystery Tour
Is waiting to take you away
Waiting to take you away… Roll up
They’ve got everything you need
Roll up for the Mystery Tour
Roll up
Satisfaction guaranteed
Roll up for the Mystery Tour
The second rock song (transformed in MagMystCroRo) is Elton John’s “Rocket Man”. From Wikipedia:
“Rocket Man” (officially titled “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time)”) is a song composed by Elton John and Bernie Taupin and originally performed by Elton John. The song first appeared on Elton John’s 1972 album Honky Château
… The song was inspired by the short story “The Rocket Man” in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, and echoes the theme of David Bowie’s 1969 song “Space Oddity” … But according to an account in Elizabeth Rosenthal’s book His Song: The Musical Journey of Elton John, the song was inspired by Taupin’s sighting of either a shooting star or a distant aeroplane.
The song describes a Mars-bound astronaut’s mixed feelings at leaving his family in order to do his job. Rosenthal’s account goes on to relate that the notion of astronauts no longer being perceived as heroes, but in fact as an “everyday occupation”, led Taupin to the song’s opening lines: “She packed my bags last night, pre-flight. Zero hour: 9 a.m. And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then.”
You can watch the official music video here (#6). The relevant part of the original:
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
‘Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
Stringing it all together. The Beattles give us magical mastery. Daily Jocks then provides mystery crotch. Elton John supplies rocketman. The last link we need is crotch rocket, especially where rocket is a metaphor for the penis, and that’s easily supplied.
First, crotch rocket is well-attested in the (metaphorical) sense ‘a motorbike, esp. a dirt bike’ (GDoS, cites from 1975 on): a noisy, explosively propelled device (similar to a rocket) ridden under your crotch. (Phonologically, there’s also a satisfying half-rhyme in the /ač/ of crotch vs. the /ak/ of rocket.) But then the expression is also used sexually, with rocket referring to the phallic symbol, producing the playful penis synonym crotch rocket, referring to the kind of rocket a man carries in his crotch. Not in GDoS, but in many lists of entertaining synonyms for penis.
Gay porn has not been deaf to the attractions of crotch rocket as a way to refer to dicks. In particular, as I noted in my 2/16/13 posting “Crotch Rocket”, it’s
the title of a Titan Men “best of” compendium of scenes with pornstar Trenton Ducati (posted about on AZBlogX, with photos of Ducati in action):
(#7) (Rocket cropped for WordPress; it’s a substantial pornstar dick, a fine exemplar of its kind, but its specific characterstics aren’t actually relevant to this posting, while Ducati the actor is — and the dick is on dsplay in the AZBlogX posting)
The actor chose Ducati as his family name for porn work because he’s a serious motorcycle enthusiast with a special interest in the Ducati make. Put that together with his pornstar dick and you’ve got a title for a Ducati DVD. Also a nice link between mystery crotch and rocketman that exploits the implied (though unseen) penis in the Daily Jocks mystery crotch.
And now we have MagMystCroRo, with a big dick in the middle of the picture, where it belongs:
(#8)
All this is wonderful, but then it turns out that Mystery Underwear can be the vehicle for two different kinds of magic, of fire (the heat of urgent desire and explosive ejaculation) or of darkness (desire turned to dread, despair, and decay — Cupid’s arrowheads dipped in poison). Choose fire if you can.
A gestural handnote. Actors and models have problems with their hands — where to put them, if they’re not actually engaged in an activity. So portraitists, photographers, and acting directors inherit the problem. On this blog, I’ve looked into one special case, involving men, their hands, and their pants (on 10/5/19). The image in #1 illustrates another special case: the male underwear model, putting (almost all of) his body on display for an ad image. What to do with the hands?
The guy in #1 has been posed performing a hand gesture I don’t recall having seen before: one closed fist on top of the other closed fist. Isolated for your inspection:
(#10)
I could speculate on what the gesture might be conveying — a “cram it, buddy!” gesture, with the top fist pushing down on the bottom one, a gesture aimed aggressively at someone else? — but that’s a foolish enterprise, because gestures are so often conventionalized, and any one gesture could come to convey almost anything, given a long enough history. The question is whether this particular gesture has a conventional interpretation in some sociocultural context — or whether the model just put his hands together that way because he had to do something with them that would keep them out of the fuzzed-over mystery-crotch area.
There are several conventions that involve this hand configuration for two different people — a variant of the usual fist bump, a joining-together on a team gesture, and probably more — but #10 has the two hands of one person. The only thing I found in an admittedly cursory web search was an ASL (American Sign Language) sign, for ‘make, create’.
From the Lifeprint site about this sign:
In one version you put the fists one on top of the other and use a twisting movement. Do the movement twice. The hands stay in contact with each other.
There is another version of the sign for “make.” In this version, the hands come apart:
(#11)
All the illustrations I’ve seen have the right fist on top, while the guy in #10 has his left fist on top. This might be a handedess thing — also, photos are often reproduced reversed — but I just don’t know. And maybe ASL, or any sign language, has nothing to do with #10.
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